Will Tunisia's 'Internet revolution' endure?

There has been a great deal written online about how much of
a positive role the Internet played in recent events in Tunisia (if you'd like
to catch up, Alex Howard's link round-up provides a good summary of the
many sides, both for and against). At CPJ, our focus is on slightly different
questions: How did the repression of the Internet hamper the ability to safely
gather news, report and analyze such events? Did that repression grow worse in
the dying days of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's government? Will it improve in the
future?

Seeking to answer these questions is not the same as
investigating how Internet may have helped a revolution succeed. But the
answers can detail how seriously the Ben Ali regime imagined the threat from
the Internet to be; and how much of an Internet revolution the country has
truly undergone.

Tunisia's suppression of online reporting and commentary is
nothing new. A decade ago, Tunisian blogger Zouhair
Yahyaoui was arrested and reportedly tortured for his online work.
Tunisian courts eventually sentenced him to two years for "propagation of
false news;" he died of a heart attack shortly after his
release in 2005. Yahyaoui was among a long string of bloggers and online
reporters who have been attacked in Tunisia. Government efforts to steal IDs
and passwords from Tunisian Web mail and social media users have been ongoing since at least mid-2010.

Nonetheless, the regime did increase its attacks on online
communication in its last few weeks. Password-stealing intensified. The usernames
and passwords collected were increasingly used to delete e-mail accounts,
Facebook groups, and disrupt the distribution of videos and reports of political
unrest. The government rounded up and detained prominent bloggers without
charges or trial. Even in its dying days, Ben Ali's administration was throwing
at least some of its resources into tightening control of the Internet, which
implies that it saw the dissemination of news reports as a threat.

The government nonetheless drew away from the most obvious
response--to shut down the Tunisian Internet entirely. It appears that the Internet
had become so vital to the operation of society that simply removing it was
seen as a step too far. Considering the longer history of press freedom
worldwide, this is not unusual: While many repressive regimes would undoubtedly
be happier without any form of a free press, few are willing to accept the
social and economic consequences of extinguishing news media completely.

Finally, when Ben Ali was forced to offer on television a series of concessions in an attempt to
prevent his administration's collapse, he included (along with price cuts for
food, and a promise that he would stand down in 2014) an announcement that all
censorship online and off would cease. Coming from a leader who had long
claimed to "respect freedom of opinion and expression,"
this admission of censorship was an extraordinary step and a clear sign of how
important such freedoms had become to Tunisians.

Repression of a free press, including the online press, is
not the only sign of an unfree society. For the majority in Tunisia struggling
with high unemployment and food prices, it was not the most important sign of a
failing government. But when the people of Tunisia opposed their leaders on a
massive and public scale, it was the repression and control of reporting that
the government used to fight back.

When questioned on this, the new state secretary in charge
of the blocking, Sami Zaoui, stated that even countries that "were more evolved in the matter of freedom"
blocked terrorist sites. That he did so via his Twitter
account might be seen as reassuring for some. Far more worrying is that
this government chose not to dismantle Ben Ali's online tools of repression
entirely. There may come a time when Tunisian governments tweet less, and
censor more. So far, the new Tunisian government has done little to protect its
online press and their readers against that future.

San Francisco-based CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator Danny O’Brien has worked globally as a journalist and activist covering technology and digital rights. Follow him on Twitter @danny_at_cpj.